1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer systems in general, and in particular to functional units within computer systems. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method for providing connection information of functional components within a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's computers are much more complex than those from just a few years ago. In order to keep track of the current state of a computer system, administrative software that is responsible for maintaining the operations of the computer system often keeps a hardware object model of the system hardware in a system memory. Such a hardware object model, which is typically generated during system startup, contains representations of a motherboard, various chips on the motherboard, on-chip functional units, and other active components.
Since different computer systems running identical software may have different configurations, a hardware object model has to be custom built according to the configuration of each computer system. Once the appropriate hardware objects have been defined in the hardware object model, the hardware objects need to be interconnected in much the same the way the actual hardware is. Typically, the interconnections are hard-coded within a software image and are generated conditionally, depending on what boards the system software has found within a computer system. The problem with such an approach is that large tables of connections are needed by the startup code because a family of computer system can have multiple boards, but many of which may not even be needed in a particular computer system. Also, if the manufacturer of a computer system needs to alter the way in which a connection is made, a brand new software image must be provided to customers by the manufacturer.
Consequently, it would be desirable to provide an improved method and apparatus for providing connection information of functional components within a computer system for the purpose of building a hardware object model for the computer system.